Swords to plowshares! Mineshafts to gemeinschaft!
NO.
First of all, the subject of this thread is civil war in Iraq. And if we hadn’t invaded in 2003, the assorted religious and ethnic groups would NOT be at each others’ throats. They’d still be under the boot heel of Saddam, of course, but there are worse circumstances than living under a despot such as Saddam, and civil war is one of those circumstances.
You are of course welcome to widen the discussion if you want, to the Middle East as a region, and to Western involvement in the region as a whole across the decades/centuries/millennia, but trust me, that brings up some thorny questions, and some arbitrary choices of inclusion and exclusion.
Oh really? You guarantee that? Guess you must have magical powers that I don’t know about.
Bye.
Hello, I must be going,
I cannot stay, I came to say
I must be going…
Damn, you didn’t even have time to read the whole paragraph. Since I presume ‘America’ is not your name.
Guess you really are pressed for time. :rolleyes:
Look, your ‘observations’ are, at a minimum, controversial statements of opinion. You want to pop into a thread just long enough to express a controversial opinion, then leave, yeah, it makes you a chicken.
And I’d personally regard the notion that there’s nothing to be done for a whole race and region of people than to let them kill each other off not only as inflammatory, but fundamentally racist as well.
No, you can say whatever you want, but there are things you can’t expect in return.
First, if you want to express controversial opinions without defending them, you can’t expect people to respect you.
Second, if your opinions are difficult to defend, which yours usually are, you should have the good sense not to express them if you don’t expect to have the time to defend them, because you can expect people to think you’re running away if you don’t either defend them or concede the point. You’re welcome to toss good sense out the window, if you don’t mind people thinking you’re running away.
I have frequently left things unsaid here at the Dope because I knew I’d get into a wrangle that I didn’t have the time and energy for, but I didn’t want to throw out some controversial statement that I thought I could defend, given unlimited time that I didn’t have.
Finally, as you know, there’s something called ‘trolling.’ You’re not guilty of it, since a troll is someone who drops into an online discussion long enough to say something controversial that gets other posters fighting with each other, then leaves the discussion. It’s something different (and AFAIK, perfectly legal under SDMB rules) to drop into a thread long enough to say controversial things that get everyone fighting with you, and then leave. It may not be against any rules, but from the standpoint of decent debate conduct, it sure is pretty low.
Why should anyone bother to read and respond to your posts if you’re not going to defend your words (or concede the point) when people respond to them?
Don’t feel you have to. After all, we know you’re pressed for time.
And if they’d said another Pol Pot would be a good thing for Cambodia, would you have to know the arguments before evaluating the absurdity of the statement?
There are some assertions that are prima facie evidence that the speaker has left reality as we know it. That someone’s willing to consider the proposition that an all-out civil war might be a good thing is one of those.
Or maybe they don’t consider the Iraqis to be ‘real’ people, whose blood and fear and pain counts as much as their own. I suppose if one claims that ground, and regards a civil war as no more consequential than a battle in a game of Risk or Diplomacy or an Avalon Hill war game, then there’s an argument to be made.
A totally racist argument, but an argument nonetheless.
:splort!:
Now we’re talkin’. That particular, and sickening, viewpoint is one I’ve heard repeatedly for decades in this country. It’s all part of the continuum in which certain people argue that nuking Mecca is a logical and reasonable response to terrorism.
Anyway, Starving_Artist sincerely seems to think you just like to blame America for various things, as some sort pf personal entertainment. You gonna set the record straight or what? 
Okay, RT, I’m back briefly and then will be gone the rest of the day, but I wanted to address a couple of things in your post. First, I’m afraid you rather badly misunderstand my motives. I don’t go around looking for things to post just to piss people off, whether I can do so legally or not. Not everyone reacts as you do. Some of the people who read my posts agree with them, some don’t, and still others read them and go “meh”. So I don’t gear my posts to a specific audience. I see a lot of things around here that I don’t agree with and I let most of them go by. Occasionally, I’ll see something I feel strongly enough about or have an opinion on, and when this is the case, I’ll post whatever it is I want to say. But the point is, I don’t post things with the intent of pissing people off, even though with some people this is the result; rather, I post things (of a political nature, that is) mostly out of a desire not to let something lie unchallenged that I think is wrong. The fact that my posts piss you and certain other people around here is incidental; not intentional.
Secondly, this is a message board. People here post, you know…messages. I should be able to post a thought or opinion without being expected to sit at the computer for the next thirty-six hours arguing with people who disagree. If you disagree then state your position, but don’t act like I’m shortchanging you somehow by not sticking around to fight it out. Sometimes I have the time and inclination to spend a lot of time on some subject, other times I don’t. But given that this is, after all, a message board, I should be able to post when and as I see fit without being accused of being ‘chicken’…and I think my posting history here clearly bears out that this is not the case.
Thirdly, when I am here, I have to devote a ridiculous amount of time refuting false claims as to what I’ve said, such as your assertion that I said “there’s nothing to be done about an entire race of people other than to let them kill each other off.”
I said no such thing, and if you’d calm down you’d know it.
What I clearly said was that if something isn’t done to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the area, that is likely to be the ultimate result. Additionally, my comments in this regard were in response to irishgirl’s stated fear that “This is edging really, really close to either a ‘kill them all and let God decide’ or a literal interpretation of Darwinism” (which I read as survival of the fittest among Middle East countries). My response was to the effect that if anyone kills them all, it will be them themselves, not us.
So in closing, if I post something you don’t like, post your response and let things go as they will. If I have both the time and inclination to battle it out, I will do so; If not, then I won’t. But as I hope you can see, there is no way for me to prejudge the audience and the reaction to whatever I might say. The only thing I can do is post what I want to say and let the chips fall where they may. But I’m not going to constrain myself when I see something I want to comment on because I might not have the time other people here seem to feel I’m obliged to spend if they choose to make a fight out of what I’ve said.
It was already clear you had no shame.
Now it’s revealed that you have no conscience either.
That’s cruel. Were I a better person, I wouldn’t be laughing.
Well, y’know, some people watch American Idol, and some of us sit at our computers and think of new things to blame America for.
Getting past the kidding, though:
I have, for all of my life, assumed America was the Good Guys in the world. My worldview in this regard was formed before Vietnam took center stage in our foreign policy in the mid-1960s, in a time when we were the country that won WWII (I’m talking about my perceptions as a kid, here, so no need to talk about Russia’s role) and WWI before that, and was now protecting the world from the evils of totalitarian Communism.
And on account of that legacy, I expect America to live up to that sort of ideal, or at least give it its best shot. I demand of my country that it not be just strong, but to use its strength on the side of what is right and good.
That view of America has taken some hits over the years, of course. It’s had to survive Vietnam, Nixon-Kissinger realpolitik, our support of numerous anticommunist tinhorn dictators like Marcos, Pinochet, Somoza, Saddam, and the Shah, and that flock of neocon surrogate wars during the 1980s: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Angola. I had to believe there was a better way of fighting Communism than by supporting ‘authoritarian’ (you’re welcome, Jeane Kirkpatrick) thugs around the world: we got democracy; El Salvador got Roberto D’Aubuisson.
But I didn’t think America was evil; America was good, but for often difficult to understand reasons, it was doing wrong. What do you do about it? You call a spade a spade: you say what’s wrong and what’s right, and you expect your country to get back on the right track.
And there were some positive developments along the way. Jimmy Carter, for all his other failings, insisted that we look at how all countries, not just Communist ones, were falling short on human rights, and take that into account in our foreign policy. The Helsinki Accords, excoriated by conservatives at the time, gave us some leverage to demand of the USSR that some degree of human rights be accorded to its Warsaw Pact vassals. And while Reagan had far too many neocon nutcases running his foreign policy (Richard Perle, Elliott Abrams), Reagan’s heart really was in the right place - he believed in freedom not just as a slogan but as a fundamental human right - and his policies gradually caught up. Along about 1983, he and his team came to the realization that D’Aubuisson was a murderous thug, and lined up behind Duarte instead; when crunch time came in the Phillippines in 1985, he helped nudge Marcos out; in 1987, he and Carter combined to hornswoggle Daniel Ortega into holding elections - and honoring them, when they didn’t go his way; and, most significantly, when he finally had a Soviet opposite number in Gorbachev who actually believed Communism should benefit the people living under it, he had the right combination of willingness to take diplomatic chances while maintaining public pressure to hasten the moment when the Wall would come down - a moment that most of us who grew up during the Cold War weren’t sure we’d live to see.
And then of course Clinton, without a Cold War foe to reckon with, gradually found his footing, and put the United States on the right side of things in Bosnia and Kosovo.
So I believe America can do great things in the world when it is good as well as strong. And I believe that when America is doing evil, and we call it by its name, America will eventually respond, and find its way back to the light.
So when America turns into a swaggering bully in the world, invading other countries without knowing WTF it’s doing and what forces it’s unleashing, let alone having a plan to deal with them, I will call it evil, and demand that America stop doing evil and do good. I will do the same when we imprison people for years when we have zero evidence that they’ve done anything hostile to us, and when we torture people, and send them off to other countries to be tortured. And when we bomb the shit out of civilians along with insurgents - insurgents who would have had little support for their insurgency if we simply weren’t there. And when our government spies on its own people without any legal authority or oversight. I want the country I’ve lived in all my life to deserve to wear the white hat again, and I want leaders who believe in the goodness of America in a way that causes them in turn to demand the best out of America - rather than believing that whatever America does is automatically good because it’s America that’s doing it.
So if I’m critical of America, it’s because I’m a fucking idealist, and for some reason, despite everything I’ve seen in my life where it’s fallen short, America is still one of the things I’m an idealist about. It’s totally irrational, and it makes no sense, but there it is.
And minature American flags for all!
Well, FoxNews had two guys (or was it one) who said there might be upside to a civil war in Iraq. Now, is that FoxNews’ official position on the situation? I don’t see what the big deal is. 60 minutes interviewed the moslem cleric who started the whole cartoon crisis. Does this mean CBS endorses the riots and killing?
I agree with Scylla. Without seeing the actual interview, it’s impossible to judge what is going on.
Yes. You would. If you form knee-jerk opinions without bothering to get the facts than you’re just another dumbass doofus. You need to know the argument and the context.
My opinions don’t require that I keep a closed mind in order to remain justified. Apparently yours do.
Or maybe they said it would be a good thing for the casket business.
Or maybe they said it would be a good thing to have it happen now while US forces can intervene and arbitrate rather than later when it would be a genocide.
Or maybe they said it would be a good thing because it would give us lots of material for action movies, and give the news business something to talk about.
But you just don’t know, do you?
Try this on: Do you notice how your cite has decided to omit the context? That’s an important piece of information, isn’t it? Why wouldn’t they tell us?
Do you suspect you might only be hearing part of the story? Could it be that you’re being manipulated?
Are you that easy?
I do hope that Starving Artist reads this paragraph and remembers it next time he tries to smear someone with his ‘Blame America’ horseshit.
Well, I went to look at Foxnews and these are the two segments that aired on February 23 for “Your World with Neil Cavuto”
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,185947,00.html (about Vegas)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,185956,00.html (Wayne Gretzky’s wife)
Hmmm.
Ditto!
And here’s the home page for the segment:
www.foxnews.com/cavuto/index.html
Nothing about it whatsoever.
Photoshop is easy though.
Media matters is an openly partisan group dedicated to revealing “conservative misinformation.”
For the time being I’m calling bullshit on this. That graphic could have been easily made up and I wasn’t able to find anything about Bill Cowan being on “Your World” in the day in question, and I did find the two segments for the day that nothing to do with the topic.
Been there, said that: your motive doesn’t matter. If you say things that are controversial, and then don’t stick around to defend them (or even worse, announce in advance that you won’t), there’s no point in bothering to respond to you, because you’re not gonna be there. So rather than doing a rebuttal and explaining why I think you’re full of horseshit, there’s little reason for me or anyone else to do more than say, “SA had another horseshit drive-by post,” and move on.
Don’t be obtuse. If you’ve read the thread, you have an idea of what sorts of arguments are being made in the thread, and to what extent yours stands out as different. There may be no rigorous metric on the distance between one position and another, but we’ve all got a pretty good feel for this.
So if you’re saying something that’s antithetical to what most people in the thread are saying, most people aren’t going to agree. That should be so obvious that it needs no explication, but in your case…
Nothing you say pisses me off. I disagree strongly with it, of course. But gimme a fucking break - if you post things “mostly out of a desire not to let something lie unchallenged that [you] think is wrong,” then to the extent that it’s a matter of opinion rather than verifiable fact, people are going to disagree with you. You’re challenging them because you and they see the world in different ways; unless they slap their foreheads and say, “Man, he’s right, I never looked at it that way before” - an effect your posts here rarely have - they’re going to take up that challenge and fire back. Oddly enough, people think you ought to be there for the return volley - otherwise, why should they write those volleys to begin with? It takes two on some sort of ongoing basis to debate, but there’s nothing ongoing about a drive-by post.
That makes sense on the face of it; without going back to another thread to see what went on, it’s hard for me to guess why it became so demanding for you. If, for instance, when people found holes in your initial post in the thread, you plugged those holes with arguments in later posts that had new holes, and so on, then it could keep going for awhile. I don’t know that there’s anything you can do about that, really - except that if it seems you’re doing a lot of hole-plugging posts, you might need to look more critically at your own arguments to see why they’ve so often got holes in them that your debate adversaries can exploit.
At some point, sure, give up. But also maybe see how many GD/Pit threads you tend to post to in the typical week, and cut back a little bit if you feel you often have to leave before your part in the discussion has naturally run its course.
You’re not shortchanging me. It’s just that there’s less point in my taking MY time to write a detailed rebuttal if you may not see it.
But wanting to get your opinions into a debate without being willing to defend them at all - yeah, that’s chicken. Sorry, but that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.
I’m trying to discern the difference between what I said, and what you said (given that what outside force is available, is pretty much already there):
Well, yeah. You said if anyone kills them all, they’ll kill each other, and that’s likely to happen if no one stops them. That’s what I thought you said.
And if you’re bothered by the specter of nukes in the region, join the club, but it’s a little late, IMHO; that horse is out of the barn, I’d say. That was another reason I argued here against the war three years ago - nuclear proliferation was a bigger threat than anything Saddam had, and a war in Iraq would leave us less able to deal with the spread of nukes. That has turned out to be entirely true. (I admit I didn’t see at the time that attacking Iraq would make the Irans of the world more eager to acquire nukes as an anti-invasion insurance policy, but professional policymakers damned well should have; it wasn’t that big of an intellectual step.)
I’d be surprised if MediaMatters doctored some photos. I think this is just an overreaction by people who are convinced that everything on FoxNews is choreogrpahed by Bush or the Republican party (which isn’t the same thing, but who cares about that when you’re a partisan organization).
Wow: “openly partisan” + “can’t find anymore about it” = “presumption that they Photoshopped it.”
Where’s that open mind now, huh?
And don’t you think that if anyone at Fox got wind of that, and found out it WAS made up (easy enough for them to verify), the whole gang at Fox would be all over MMfA by now?
My mind’s open, but it’s not so open that it has to reconsider all possibilities every time. There’s nothing closeminded about ridiculing the notion that an open civil war, in which many thousands would die in a fairly short time, and most others would live in constant fear, could somehow be a good thing. I’ve got a pretty wide-ranging imagination, and if a proposition’s put forward that I can’t possibly imagine a humane argument in support of, I’ll go ahead and ridicule it now, and apologize later if the near-impossible (in a case like this) should happen and I’m wrong.
That isn’t to say it’s usually nearly impossible for me to be wrong, but on something like this, though, let’s be real.